The iPad is going to save the publishing industry. It’s so obvious, that it feels silly saying it.

As a kid I always envisioned the ever changing newspaper. You’d buy one newspaper, and that would then change its content every day. Kind of like what they showed in Harry Potter, but at that time I don’t think the series even existed. My vision of course was limited, in that I didn’t realise that content needn’t be dictated by its form. That the newspaper, rather, its content, could be moulded to fit into any shape and form. The newspaper is just the medium for communicating that content. The iPad another medium; a better medium, which has just about enough of portability, power, and natural interaction that we can begin to move media over to the digital platform. But are the newspapers and magazines of this world ready for it?

To answer that, it’s important to understand that the iPad is not a magazine. It’s not a newspaper. It’s not any of those things. The iPad is a platform, an interface device, for content consumption, creation, communication, and anything else you can envision on its 10 inch screen size. The iPad is dynamic in the things it can display. It’s dynamic in the way it’s held. It screen size is limited in physical dimensions, but its boundaries are endless. And most of all, it has the capacity to understand and manipulate data, something which is completely absent in ‘dumb’ print media. To truly capture this platform, content needs to be re-architected from the ground up.

Magazines make an entry

The early magazine apps that showed up on the iPad failed. Failed miserably. They simply took their print magazine, made slides out of each page, and sent them trotting to the App Store. The formatting was entirely directed at print, its text was not rendered on device, so it couldn’t be manipulated, and there was zero interactivity with what you were seeing. GQ and Maxim are two prime examples of this failure.

Wired made a big splash with its iPad app. It was the first magazine app that was designed from the ground up to be viewed on the iPad. It won on many levels, but failed to truly capture the form factor. Condé Nast went with Adobe’s new technology that created these partially fluid layouts that changed according to orientation. However, Adobe’s technology is built to translate print layouts for digital consumption. Every page was a separate bitmapped image; a card. That’s ‘dumb’ content on a smart device. Wired also clung to many concepts of the print world — columns for layout. Columns are used in print because you want to use as much of the page area as you can without stretching lines too long. The iPad however is a never ending digital display, so why pursue this need to save ‘paper’? Moreover, since Wired did its text rendering before publishing, what the user was seeing was rasterised text. Add to that their navigation was confusing, and it was stuffed with ‘interactive’ ads. I found it quite absurd that the Wired app downloads all videos on device, most of which are advertorial. It took me a whole night to download the 500MB issue on my iPad, which I soon deleted because I’d rather have the space for media. The iPad is an interface device, not a storage device. The take from this, is that Wired for iPad is certainly better than a plain PDF, and it’s readable, but this is not the future of magazine apps on the iPad.

Wired sports a smart navigation, though a little confusing.

Newsweek has done a pathetic job at hacking their print design and presenting it with absolutely no grace or flow. The landscape tries to fit two full pages side by side, and the portrait mode is filled with half stories. Swipe through the magazine, bitmapped card after card. An utterly wasteful magazine, considering even its content is not worth the $2.99, let alone the presentation.

Full resolution shots of landscape and portrait; try reading.

TIME Inc. on the other hand has been doing a fabulous job on the iPad. Their three magazines — TIME, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune — have a splendid engine powering their presentation. Each issue is specially designed for the iPad, right down to switching panels and layouts for landscape and portrait modes. Time is not afraid to waste pixels, which it liberally does while showing off large captioned images, hanging quotes, and pictures. They’ve also used live text for long stories in portrait mode, which you can pinch in and out to change size, in a single column with enough padding on the sides. The landscape mode falls back to bitmapped cards to preserve the ‘magazine like’ layout, but there is a presentation element in there that’s much appreciated. There is some discrepancy between landscape and portrait, where you can’t just switch the view midway and retain position; a bug that needs to be fixed quick. It also has no ‘memory’, so you’re always starting the app fresh.

Those columns don’t belong on a digital display.

One thing Time didn’t do — and it’s a good thing, I think — is go overboard with the interactivity. They have slideshows which you can thumb through, and videos which stream from within the app, but didn’t pursue any of the absurd “CD-ROM” interactive stuff that’s been demonstrated as a possibility.

How an article reads in the Time app

The most important thing, is that Time magazine reads like a magazine. Within moments, you’re engrossed in an article, and just as easily, you can switch to the next one. It’s got its fair share of imperfections, but overall it’s on the right track.

I’d get into magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, but they’re more specialised in content, and audience, and can experiment with a lot crazier layouts than traditional news magazines can.

The Experiment

In a bid to find out how regular people would approach this new form of media, I gave the iPad to a few tech luddites that I know — my mother being one of them — and asked them to view the Time magazine. I would have shown them Wired and Pop Mec, but they wouldn’t be interested in that kind of content. When asked, all five subjects did not think they’d like the idea of reading a magazine on the iPad, or at least didn’t expect it to be better than a physical magazine.

The magazine comes with instructions on turning the cover, but none of my subjects felt like reading them. They immediately proceeded to swiping the articles, not realising that you have to swipe down to read an article in full. After I briefly explained what they were doing wrong — they were a little annoyed that this needed ‘instructions’ — they a they quickly adjusted and fluidly moved across articles, even pulling up the article browser to switch between stories.

At the end of the experiment, in which each of them read at least two full articles (out of pure interest), all but one preferred the iPad to reading a physical magazine. The text was much more readable, the pictures looked better, they said. They especially appreciated the liberal use of full sized images — not feasible in print. “I love that one can choose any of the back issues from one place”, said one of the subjects. They all appreciated that it wasn’t made from trees and didn’t require fossil fuel for delivery.

The one person, a little more tech savvy than the others, who wasn’t on board said it didn’t feel like a magazine. “For instance, you don’t instantly know where you are in the magazine, something I find important in the magazine experience. Here, one article looks like another.” The subject was also more inclined to reading ‘free’ articles on the web than paying for a magazine at all. I’d say ‘these people’ are trying to cling to experiences of the past, because it would be quite difficult to imagine a world without physical magazines. There are some genuine claims in favour of the physical thing as well: borrowing an issue, cutting out an article for posterity, and what’re doctors gonna put on the coffee table? It would be inhuman of us not to appreciate these things. But in this case, the benefits of a digital magazine outweigh the losses.

To sum up: Time magazine on the iPad is mostly preferred to Time magazine in print.

But no one’s gonna buy it

Practically every magazine on the store, costs $4.99 per issue, with some back issues going for $2.99. Magazines on the iPad need to be cheaper, or at least on par, with subscriptions. None of my subjects were willing to pay more for any magazine than they currently do — which in most cases is a subscription. Buying magazine issues at $5 per issue, when $10 gets you a year’s subscription of the physical copy, is out of the question.

As I understand it, Magazines largely make their money from advertising. Which is why healthcare and entertainment magazine subscriptions are so cheap and offer valuable hard-to-believe ‘gifts’ — they want to ensure they have a steady channel of premium advertising to your doorstep. They’d give it away for free if they didn’t know that people don’t value free stuff as much as they do things they’ve paid for. Not all media is entirely ad-supported, and they do depend on revenue from sales, but certainly not at newsstand pricing (which is priced high so people will subscribe). Wired sure sold 24 thousand copies in 24 hours, but that was primarily due to the media frenzy that was raving about this new way of presentation. They never revealed how many copies they sold of issue 2 and 3.

“Can we get Outlook on ‘this thing’?” was one of the first questions a subject asked me after setting the iPad down. People are actually willing to pay for a good experience digital news media on their iPad — where the market couldn’t go past the price of ‘free’. Condé Nast with Wired, and Time Inc. have the right idea in terms of the experience, but they need to figure out their pricing. A TIME spokesperson said that they’re working out the ‘technical details’ and hope to have subscriptions later this year. That’s not too bad a timeframe, given the nascency of this platform, but I hope they don’t delay it further than that.

Whatever the case, the iPad sure is ready to front the digital transition of print media.